


In Which Life is More Complicated Than Lists

by lunarlychallenged



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Bets, F/M, Prom, Tutoring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-14
Updated: 2018-12-28
Packaged: 2019-09-18 09:14:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16992204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunarlychallenged/pseuds/lunarlychallenged
Summary: “Amy Santiago,” he said, “will you be my math tutor?”“No.”Or, being Jake's tutor ruins pretty much every plan Amy ever made.





	1. Chapter One

_Amy’s Post-Spring Break Housekeeping:_

_Clean out locker._

_Spruce up binders._

_Get a head start on AP assignments._

_Get rid of Jake Peralta._

 

Jake, affronted, scooched his chair away from hers. “I’m just saying, literally nobody does housekeeping stuff for spring break. Why make a list?”

“To get my life in order,” she said. So she could cross them off.

“Or, just to spice things up a little, you could not do that.”

Amy’s glare was withering.

“It’s what the rest of us do,” he said.

“That’s why I avoid the hallway with your locker.” Her nose wrinkled. “Is that muffin still there?”

“Home to at least ten generations of flies,” he said with pride. “An ant colony is moving in. I’m like a proud great-great-great-great—”

“I get it.” She added ‘Burn Jake’s locker’ to the list.

“That’s genocide,” Jake said. “You’re a monster.”

“Don’t sit with me, then.” Jake had been her voluntary desk partner in homeroom for three-and-a-half years, despite her frequent complaints and and attempts to move around. That made a lot more sense at the end of sophomore year, when he admitted to having a crush on her. After that, once he’d moved on, Amy had more trouble understanding his angle. He insisted that it was necessary to sit together, since—

“I’m still waiting for you to agree to go to prom with me, Santiago. Until you do, I’m going to woo you so hard.”

“It’s the beginning of April,” she said.

“So you’d better start looking for a dress.”

“We aren’t dating, and we don’t want to date.”

Jake smiled. “Believe me, you’ll be taking that back once you see me in a Ron Stoppable style tux.”

“Oh my god,” she said. He’d dropped hints about what he was going to do for their ‘inevitable’ date, and the range of his creativity and strategizing nulled every excuse he’d ever made about not being smart enough for school.

“You’ll want to ride around in my car,” he crooned.

“No.”

“Kiss me under the bleachers—”

Amy gave an exaggerated gag.

“No,” he said reverently. “No, you’ll want to make out with me at the top of the Wonder Wheel during the class trip.”

Amy couldn’t help it—she laughed. She wasn’t sure if that qualified as a dating tradition at their school, but it was certainly close. When seniors went to Coney Island at the end of the school year, people noticed who went on the ferris wheel together at the end of the night. People gossiped about couples going separately, or so-and-so going with somebody they swore they weren’t into. Amy and Jake going on the Wonder Wheel together would, in some ways, be more damning for her than going to the prom with him.

“You laugh,” Jake said, “but I look foine as heck in a powder blue suit.”

“That would matter more to me if I was shallow enough to date based on looks alone.”

“And that would be a better burn if you loosened up enough to date people who weren’t your penis-ed clones.”

Amy swallowed, picked up her pencil, and continued working on her list. Jake must have known that he touched a nerve, since he didn’t try to talk to her again before the bell rang.

 

 

_Amy: There’s nothing wrong with dating people who I have things in common with._

_Terry: i know_

_Amy: I could date somebody different if I wanted to._

_Terry: i know_

_Amy: Jake is the worst._

_Terry: believe me, Terry knows_

 

 

Amy was not upset. There was no way she was upset that Jake thought she was playing it safe when she dated people, because that would mean that Jake’s opinion mattered to her in some way. It did not matter, and she did not text Terry because she was hurt.

She texted Terry because she’d missed him since he left for college. High school was so much easier with him around to keep all of them in check. He was such a mother hen, and she hadn’t realized she needed that until only chicks were left in the nest.

She went to have a silent rage in the bathroom because sometimes being a hormonal teenager was difficult. She had a hormone imbalance, not hurt feelings.

And, okay, maybe she did avoid seeing Jake on her way to Physics. But that was because she didn’t want him to think she was upset, not because she really was.

Listing everything out didn’t make her look like she was in a good mood, and that was actually a little upsetting. Amy made a mental note to research strategies in building better arguments. It was starting to look like she was pretty bad at it.

When she walked out of Physics, Jake was leaning against the lockers by the door. “Amy! There you are. I’ve been looking for you since lunch.”

“Why?”

He hopped into step with her, following her to her next class without question. He tossed her a muffin, graciously not commenting when she nearly dropped it in her surprise..

“If this is the locker muffin, I would rather die than have it within ten feet of me,” she said.

“It’s not a locker muffin.” Jake looked at the ceiling for a second, blowing a kiss at the sky. “It was totes gonna be, but that muffin crumbled into moldy dust when I tried to pick it up. Let’s have a moment of silence for all of the homeless flies and ants—”

“Jake, I really have to go to class.”

“Fine,” he sighed. “Ruin my entire speech, why don’t you? Okay, it’s an I’m-sorry-for-being-a-jerk muffin. I got it for you at lunch, but I didn’t see you.”

The muffin—he’d gotten her favorite kind—was still wrapped in cellophane. It didn’t look like he’d eaten any, or like he had tried to hide something inside. She clutched it a little tighter when she looked back at him. “Thanks. You didn’t have to—”

“No der,” he said. He shoved his hands in his hoodie pockets, effortlessly dodging elbows and backpacks. He didn’t have to make himself small to walk through the school. Amy made another mental note, this time to try and figure out how Jake did it. “I’m pretty much broke, so that’s a special muffin, Santiago. I was kind of a jerk earlier, and that wasn’t cool. Exes are off limits. Truce?”

Amy looked at her feet so he would miss her smile. “Alright. Truce.”

“Bomb,” he grinned. 

“I didn’t date Teddy because he was like me,” she blurted. “I really liked him.”

Jake looked at her like she had two heads. “‘Course you did. I never thought that you didn’t like him. I just think that—please don’t hate me—you liked him because he’s like you. He was safe.” Then, looking around the school like he’d never been there, “geez, my class is like five minutes from here. Gotta blast!”

He ran down the hall, still managing to miss running into anything except a broken locker that hung permanently open. Amy was sure that he was running away from her as much as he was running to class, but that didn’t keep a small bubble of warmth from growing in her chest while she popped a chunk of muffin in her mouth.

Truce.

 

 

_Amy DID NOT Date Teddy Because He Was Comfortable:_

_He said “I love you” after two months, which was Not Comfortable._

_He was uncomfortable when Jake teased Amy, which made everybody uncomfortable._

_He commented on the Jake-Amy discomfort in front of Sophia, which made EVERYBODY uncomfortable._

_He tried being friendly to Rosa, so Amy was probably two seconds from death._

_He tried to defend Amy when Gina said mean things, which was uncomfortable for everybody._

_He was nice when Amy broke up with him, which made Amy feel like an uncomfortable dirtbag._

 

 

“Look, Amy, I know that you’re a little nuts,” Jake said. He stopped talking, looking at her with raised eyebrows like they would get his point across on their own.

She looked up from her paper, raising an eyebrow. “Is that all you have to say?”

He grinned. “No. I know you’re a little coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs, but using a ruler to design a homeroom shirt is an all time low.”

Amy looked at the design. “What, I’m supposed to submit a shirt design with uneven lettering?”

“That’s what everybody else is doing.”

“Yeah, there’s no way I would ever—wait, no, I’ve got the perfect idea. What if, instead of words, we had—”

“Holt’s face on the front? Yeah, there’s no way he’d go for that.” Jake tried to twirl a pencil around his fingers, but it flew to the floor. “Totes tried that already. Keep up.”

Amy liked Holt. She liked him a Lot. She liked him as a teacher, as a role model, as an unofficial (though he surely knew about her admiration) mentor. Amy would do absolutely anything to make him like her, but she had an unfortunate inability to figure out how to do so.

“Right,” she said. She had been half-way through writing the idea down on her list of shirts, but she hurriedly erased it. “Yes, of course. He’d probably like something simple best, anyway.”

“You know him so well.”

“I should ask him what he likes.”

Jake grinned. “Definitely. Ask Holt what he wants the t-shirts, which are supposed to be designed by the students, to look like.”

Her hand was already skyrocketing when she realized that Jake was definitely making fun of her.

Holt was walking to her desk.

Amy wondered which options she should suggest—the names of everybody in the class? Graduation year? The school mascot?

Her lips spread into a manic grin, and she could already feel the coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs taking over.

“Mr. Peralta,” Holt intoned.

Jake, who had looked like a kid in a candy store, now looked confused. “Mr. Holt.”

Holt put an envelope on Jake’s desk, sloppily labelled ‘Money and Coney should rhyme.’ “You do not currently meet the qualifications for the Coney Island trip. You may keep the deposit.”

“What?” Jake gaped at him, and Amy wished that she was somewhere, anywhere else. “Sir, I have to go on that trip.”

“You have to get your grades up. Evaluate your priorities, Peralta.”

She would never have thought that Jake was capable of getting paler than usual, and she wished that she could go on in ignorance. Getting in trouble was no new thing for Jake, but he never looked this upset by it. “Which grades?”

“All of them,” Holt said dryly, “but your math scores are abhorrent. If you could raise those without lowering the others, you could go on the trip.”

“Will do, sir,” Jake said, plastering on a broad grin that Amy knew was false.

“Santiago, did you need something?”

Amy jolted. Her smile was probably reflective of Jake’s. “Nope. It’s all good. It’s all good in the hood.”

“You live in a suburban neighborhood,” Holt said.

“In the metaphorical hood, sir.”

“That was a terrible metaphor,” he said. “You usually do so well in English. I can give you a resource to touch up on your language arts.”

Amy wanted to die.

Jake laid his forehead on the desk with a dull thud.

Amy still had no idea what to do for her shirt design.

Everything was terrible.

 

 

“This is a travesty,” Charles announced. He set his lunchbox next to Amy’s, which struck her as moderately strange. It wasn’t uncommon for the lot of them to eat lunch with her; some days the stars aligned and the right number of seats were available. It was uncommon for Charles to sit somewhere without ensuring that there was room for Jake right next to him, and sitting by Amy offered no guarantees.

(Okay, so maybe Amy was surprised because she wasn’t usually the first choice to sit by. That didn’t mean there couldn’t be alternate reasons.)

“Is your sandwich squished?” She eyed Charles’ bag doubtfully. If his sandwich was ruined, there would probably be a gross smell when he opened the bag. There might be regardless, but it would be worse if the bread was wet and oozing.

“No,” he said. “That would be bad, though.”

“You have a crush on a vegan,” Gina suggested, sitting on the opposite end of the table.

“Impossible.”

“Jake found a new best friend,” Rosa said.

“Unspeakable,” Charles said. He sounded so serious, so upset at the very concept, that Amy choked a little on her milk. “No, the problem is that Jake can’t come to Coney Island with us.”

Amy hummed. “Yeah, the populace weeps.”

“No worries, sweet thang,” said somebody right behind her. Jake collapsed into the seat on Amy’s left, ignoring the open seat by Charles. “I have a plan.”

Her eyes narrowed. Jake always sat by Charles. Jake only called her stupid nicknames when he wanted something. “Whatever it is, I’m not doing it.”

“Whatever it is, I’m game,” Charles said.

“Charles, my platonic love, you cannot help me. It will take a miracle to raise my math scores, and there is only one miracle at this table.”

“There are no miracles here,” Amy said desperately.

Gina tossed her hair. “Speak for yourself, biatch.”

“Amy Santiago,” he said, “will you be my math tutor?”

“No.”

“That’s a great plan, Jake,” Charles said. “Amy, you have to do it. It’s for the good of mankind.”

She shook her head adamantly. “What does Coney Island have to do with the good of mankind?”

“Mankind,” Jake said. “Man is singular. It only has to help one man.”

“And Jake is kind of a man, so man-kind,” Charles said, grinning. “Do it for the good of man-kind, Amy.”

“That was not helpful.” Jake sighed. “Look, Santiago, I really want this. Really, really. Like, I want this the way you want to bone Holt—”

“Jesus Christ, Jake. He’s gay. He’s married.”

“—and you are my only hope,” he finished. “Tutoring will make you look like Mother Teresa or something, right?”

“Not if the person still fails,” she mumbled.

“Look at that,” Gina said. “Amy Santiago, admitting she can’t get Jake a passing grade. The world is falling into anarchy.”

That was not what Amy was saying at all. Amy could get Jake a passing grade. Amy could get a brain-dead mouse a passing grade. She just wasn’t sure that Jake had the motivation to do the work. “I’m not falling for that.”

Jake gave a dramatic sigh, opening his chocolate milk.

Charles drooped, pushing his lunchbox away. He propped his chin in his hands and looked mournfully at Amy.

She grimaced into her sandwich, trying to ignore the two boys. Even knowing that Charles had had no idea what Jake would ask for could not convince her that Charles did not have some kind of subconscious awareness that he would need to grovel today. His eyes were the size of planets.

No, no, no. Amy did not have time to tutor Jake. She did not have time to plan for the first half of a study session to be him whining, or throwing erasers at her. She did not have time to get dinner with him when he got bored.

“I can’t,” she said.

“Amy, I swear to God, I will try.” Jake raised his pinky in an incomplete pinky promise. “I’ll listen when you talk, and I’ll do the homework.”

“You aren’t doing the homework?”

“I’ll show up to our study sessions,” he continued, ignoring her. “I’m all in, Amy. I can do this.”

Amy could not do this.

_Reasons to Help Jake With Math:_

_Looks good on a resume._

_Holt might appreciate it._

_Jake needs it._

She closed her eyes and sighed. “Fine.”

Jake and Charles erupted.

“But it isn’t my fault if you don’t do well enough to go on the trip,” she said.

“It is,” Jake said gleefully. “It really is, and there are no take backs.”

Amy really, really could not do this.

 

 

_Amy: Please come back and tutor Peralta for me._

_Terry: Terry is in college now. fix Jake yourself._

_Amy: Please, Terry, I need you._

_Terry: i can’t hear you over the sound of me not dealing with Jake anymore_

 

 

Seven Weeks Until Prom

 

 

“Alright,” Amy said, spreading out a full schedule of the rest of the school year. “Here’s what I’m thinking: we meet three times a week. One day for old material, one for new, and the last for whatever we didn’t accomplish on the first two. If you could make a list of the stuff you didn’t get—”

“You have a syllabus, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool. Then you have everything I didn’t understand.” Jake offered her a Sour Patch Kid, but she wrinkled her nose and pushed the bag back to him. “Amy, this is a lot to cover.”

“That’s on you. If you were having this much trouble, you should have asked for help earlier.”

Jake shot her a dubious look. “Would you have agreed?”

She had barely agreed this time around, when there were actual penalties to his failure. That being said, there was something about Jake’s face that made her want to help. It was why she didn’t really fight against sitting with him in homeroom, or banish him from her lunch table. It was why she spent two hours making a binder to map out their tutoring sessions.

“I might have,” she said, “if you’d asked nicely.”

He hummed. “I’ll keep that in mind when I have trouble in college.”

“Pretty presumptuous of you to assume I’ll take your calls in college,” Amy said.

“Is it, though?” A smiling Jake pulled her schedule over, ignoring the confusion of her face. Of course Jake and Amy would stop talking after graduation. Most people did, and they weren’t close. “Aight, this is a lot. Presumptuous of you to assume I can learn this much.”

“You will learn this much,” she said firmly. “You’ll be dreaming about math by the time I’m done with you.”

“Weird kink, but I’m willing to try.”

 

 

Charles was waiting by APUSH, which was a little weird. He walked into class with her and slid into the desk next to her, which was a little weirder.

“I know what you’re doing,” he said in a low, smug voice.

Amy frowned at her open backpack. “Getting ready for class? Yeah, that’s no big discovery. Now, if you’re saying you figured out my ordering system—”

“With Jake! I know what you’re doing with Jake.” Charles beamed at her, wiggling his eyebrows in a way that was simultaneously flirtatious and twitchy. “You’re studying with him, hanging out outside of school—”

“I mean, he asked me to do that—”

“Because you like him,” Charles finished triumphantly.

Amy felt like she was having war flashbacks. The high school was the battlefield. People’s stupid, smug faces were ammo. Jake Peralta, with a crush and no self-control, was her enemy. In all honesty, he’d been incredibly decent about his feelings. There’d been some awkwardness for a while, but that was because of other people’s reactions to Jake’s feelings.

Charles was a war criminal, but Amy had been willing to pardon him. Evidently, that was a mistake.

“I had no idea that being nice was a sign of love,” she said dryly. She started lining up highlighters on the edge of her desk, separated by color and frequency of use.

“And he loves you,” Charles cooed. “I hear wedding bells.”

No. Amy could not go through this again. She didn’t need teachers to tell her that boys teased girls they liked. She did not need the paranoia that came with thinking a boy liked her, or that confusion when she tried to figure out if she liked him back. She dealt with that over a year ago, and she had been so happy to be through with it.

“If you start talking about this again, I’ll stop tutoring Jake,” she said seriously. When Charles gasped, she nodded. “I mean it, Boyle. I don’t need Jake reading into things that aren’t there.”

“He won’t be,” Charles promised, jumping up when the warning bell rang.

“Thank you.”

“Because it’s the truth,” he crowed, drawing the last word out while he dodged out of the room.

Amy rested her forehead against the desk. She had forgotten how obsessive Charles was. Maybe she should have skipped school and gone to a museum instead.

 

 

_Charles: good luck on the study date!_

_Charles: I made snacks if you want them_

_Charles: jake does better work with treats_

_Charles: ;p_

_Amy: I really appreciated that until I got to the winky face, but now I’m not so sure._

_Charles: I sent the wink because jake likes non-food treats too_

_Charles: ;p_

_Amy: Oh my God, please stop._

 

 

Five Weeks Until Prom

 

 

“Ms. Santiago, I need you to stay after class for a moment,” Holt said.

Amy’s heart soared. Her stomach plummeted. She wanted to run away. She wanted to stay rooted to her seat. “Yes, sir.”

Jake waggled his eyebrows at her. “Oh, somebody got in trouble.”

“As if, Peralta,” she snorted. “I haven’t gotten in trouble at school since—”

“Since the Great Frog Battle of freshman year,” he finished.

“We aren’t calling it that.”

“You got caught throwing a frog at me—”

“After you threw it at me—”

“God, your mom yelled at you about that—”

“I cannot stand you—”

“I think it damaged my ears—”

“Mr. Peralta,” Holt said, raising his voice above their squabbling. “The bell rang. You are dismissed.”

Sure enough, the classroom was empty. Jake grinned, wiggling his fingers in a little wave on his way out. “Deuces, Amy.”

Holt watched her, face impassive, until she gave a broad grin. “How are you, sir?”

“Passable. A little surprised, perhaps, to hear that you have been tutoring Jake Peralta.”

Her heart thrilled. “It was a good opportunity for the both of us.”

“Have you both gotten something out of it?”

That was a spectacular question, but not one the she had a good answer to.

_Things to be Gained From Tutoring:_

_The knowledge the Jake probably had ADHD. Possibly dyslexia. (A halfblood? Maybe.)_

_A newfound (if terrible) ability to catch nuts in her mouth_

_A consistent group of people to eat lunch with_

_Far too much attention from Charles_

 

_Things Not to be Gained From Tutoring:_

_Mathematical ability_

_Good grades_

_A resume builder_

“We’ve both learned a lot,” she said.

Holt’s slow blink made her think that he saw right through her. “I see. I’m pleased that you took on this responsibility.”

“Really?”

“Of course. Peralta has always responded better to your guidance than anybody else’s.”

She frowned. “Oh, I don’t think—”

“It’s true,” he said. “Jacob is starving for attention, and you give him an abundance of it.”

Amy put her hands behind her back to keep him from seeing the way her fingers twitched. She did not pay a lot of attention to Jake; she gave him a perfectly reasonable amount. Nay, she paid less attention to him than others. She didn’t fawn over him, or agree to go out with him, or behave in a certain way to catch his eye. Furthermore, Jake never listened to her. He just tried to get a rise out of her, and he usually failed.

“Well, thank you, sir,” she said. The smile was a little more forced than before. “I hope I can make a difference.”

“We all do.”

 

 

_Jake: concept - chicken nugget buffet_

_Amy: What?_

_Jake: for the prom limo_

_Amy: Bold choice. I’m sure your date will love it._

_Jake: im sure you will._

_Amy: Don’t do this. Charles will read your texts._

_Jake: too late. he read over my shoulder_

_Amy: Oh God._

_Jake: im so sorry_

_Jake: also, i dropped my binder out a window, and dont have math notes anymore_

_Jake: srry byeeeeeeeeeee_

 

 

Four Weeks Until Prom

 

 

“I can’t do this,” Jake said.

She glanced up from her work long enough to see which problem he was working on. “Oh, we’ve talked about that type of problem. Give it a shot, and I’ll walk you through it if you get it wrong. You’ve got this.”

“Not this problem,” Jake said, and it was the flat note in his voice that got her attention. “All of this. This is all so hard, Amy, and I honestly don’t care about any of it anymore.”

No. No, no, no, this was not how the tutoring was supposed to go. She was ready for it to be hard, and she was ready for Jake to have trouble focusing. Amy refused to let Jake sink because he felt defeated. The only person who defeated Jake Peralta was Amy Santiago, and he would not fail when she was supposed to help him win.

“I just—who cares about any of this?” Jake dropped his pencil and gestured at the worksheet, at her binder, at the spread of notes. “I’m never going to need to do math this difficult, and if I did, I would just find a website to do it for me! I can go to Coney Island anytime. I’m sorry; I know you’ve worked hard on this, but I just can’t—”

“Let’s raise the stakes,” she blurted.

Nobody defeats Jake except Amy.

He blinked, baffled. “What?”

“Coney Island isn’t doing it for you anymore. That’s fine. If I came up with a better motivator, would you care about your grade?”

“Maybe,” he said, picking up the pencil and giving it a thoughtful twirl. “What kind of motivation are we talking about?”

She grinned. “Best case scenario, what grade do you think you could get in Pre-Calc?”

“I’d try to calculate it, but, well,” he said, starting to smile back. “Let’s say a C.”

Alright. Amy had to get Jake from a failing grade to a C. Doable, but she needed something worth the work.

_Bribes for Jake:_

_Candy (Effective, but not in the long term)_

_Embarrassing stories (Is it really worth it?)_

_Something he’s always asking for_

She took a deep breath, grimacing. “If you have above a C-minus in math by the time prom comes around, I'll go to prom with you.”

Jake looked like his birthday had come early. “No way.”

“Hey, I can take it back if—”

“No! No, I want that. No take backs.” He beamed, looking hungrily at her face. Amy had the uncomfortable feeling that he was imagining everything plan he’d ever made, all coming true in one night. Even in her dread, there was a small hint of anticipation. Jake Peralta was unstoppable, and she wanted to see his limits. The smile froze. “Wait. That’s if I win. What if I don't?”

Amy hadn't thought about that. “Believe me, going to Coney Island without you is reward enough.”

Jake tutted. “It's not a real bet if you don't win anything.”

“Fine.” What did she want? A million things, none of them having to do with Jake. “I dunno. You'll have to drive me anywhere I want for the rest of the year.”

He gaped at her. “Christ, Amy. Why not just ask for the entire car?”

“And pay for gas money? No thanks.” She grinned, warming up to the idea. “No, I want you to be my personal chauffeur.”

He groaned. “Now I really need a C. You strike a hard bargain.”

She knew he could do it. Jake was bright, and he was relentless when he set his mind to something. In her own stubborn, unspoken way, she wanted to see him do well. If that meant she had to suffer through bad dances and undoubtedly awkward couples-pictures, she would. “Are you man enough to take it?”

“I’ll take your bet,” Jake said, “and it has nothing to do with my ding-a-ling. It has everything to do with my very limited gas money.”

“If you can’t afford to take me to prom, I won’t hold it against you,” she said sweetly.

“I may be too cheap for gas, but I’ll spare no expense for you, snookums,” Jake said. He thrust out his hand, and he beamed when Amy shook it.

 

 

_Rules for the Bet:_

_Ends the Friday before prom, when Jake gets his test grade back_

_No cheating on the test_

_AMY REALLY HAS TO TRY TO HELP JAKE WITH MATH_

_NO SABOTAGE_

_No unnecessary capitalization, Jake_

_GIVE THINGS THE GRAVITY THEY DESERVE, AMY_

_NO FALLING IN LOVE WITH JAKE (Not as hard to avoid as you’d think)_


	2. Chapter Two

Three Weeks Until Prom

 

 

Jake was going a little overboard on the whole “bet” thing, since it wasn’t an actual bet. She tried to explain it to him; it couldn’t be a real bet when Amy’s job was to help Jake win. It couldn’t be a real bet when Amy would win just by deciding not to play. It was not a real bet, but Jake went all out on it.

Jake made a binder of prom ideas. He had restaurants in mind, limo companies, suits, dresses, and corsage plans. He texted Amy insults in the middle of the night, and he put study sessions on hold so they could get milkshakes to celebrate his successes on homework assignments.

In short, Amy had to put an awful lot more work into the situation after the bet than she did before. Still, Jake was smiling more. She supposed that counted as a win.

 

 

_Amy: If I sent you a Khan Academy video, would you watch it? I have eight that could be really helpful._

_Jake: is James T. Kirk in them_

_Amy: We both know the answer to that._

_Jake: then no_

_Jake: but i did find a vine compilation you might like_

_Jake: ill send it to you_

 

 

“Ya boi has a D-plus in math,” Jake beamed, cocking both thumbs toward himself. “Regretting the bet yet?”

“No,” Amy snorted. “You’ll faceplant at the finish line, just like always.”

(Okay, maybe that had only happened the one time in sixth grade, on Field Day. Still, Amy beat him then, and it was surely a symbol of every aspect of their relationship.)

“I’m pretty sure that you’re the only person who’s ever been proud of a D-plus,” Rosa said. She bit into a PB&J, ignoring the way jelly splooshed out the sides. “Loser.”

“Duh. D is for dream team, and Amy is stuck being a part of mine.”

“Deplorable,” Amy said.

“Duh bomb.”

Rosa smirked. “Desperate.”

“Dope,” Charles offered.

“I’m pretty sure dope is also an insult,” Amy said.

“Guys, you are serious buzzkills,” Jake said. He ate a savage spoonful of pudding. “D is for ‘damn, son, you gon’ beat Amy so hard, and she gon’ go to prom with you.’”

“Jake, every time I think you hit rock bottom, you pull out another shovel,” Amy said. Still, she was smiling. Still, a part of her was proud of that D-plus. Still, she would rather he win than not.

 

 

_Terry: how goes the tutoring?_

_Amy: It’s a success._

_Terry: thats great_

_Amy: That depends on who you ask._

_Terry: im never going to understand you two_

 

 

Jake’s handwriting was absolutely deplorable, making it nearly impossible for Amy to check his work upside down. She focused instead on coloring in the little french fries and milkshake on the kid’s menu. She only had two crayons, but she could get different shades thereof if she varied the pressure—

“This is seriously lame, Santiago. When I told you we should do something else, I didn’t mean that we should do math in a restaurant—”

Amy raised one eyebrow. “I thought you said that you were game for anything I wanted to do.”

Jake sighed. “Yeah, I meant it, but—”

“I thought you wanted to win.”

“I do.”

Amy grinned. “Keep working on the sinusoidal patterns, pal.”

If she was being honest, it was nice to study in the diner instead of the library. Something about the greasy food and upbeat music was more fun, if more distracting. Besides, Amy hadn’t had much of a life for the past few weeks. She hadn’t realized that she missed going out, but she really had.

Jake ordered chicken tenders and fries without looking at the menu, and Amy wondered if that was what he ordered at every restaurant. She could imagine him eating variations of one or two meals, over and over again.

The waitress smiled at Amy. “It’s been a while. Same thing as always?”

“Absolutely. Thank you so much,” Amy said. She hadn’t bothered looking at the menu either.

“She knew your order,” Jake said. “You’re like a person out of a movie, or a sitcom.”

Amy shrugged. “I used to come hear a lot.”

His eyes narrowed. “No, wait—this is like the Truman Show. It’s like this is a carefully crafted world, centered around you, where busy waitresses still remember what you order.”

“If this was the Truman Show, would you be allowed to break the fourth wall?”

“I’m actually here to rescue you,” he said. “You’re going to fall madly in love with me when I break you out. We’ll probably have a torrid love affair.”

Amy wrinkled her nose. She’d imagined having torrid love affairs before, usually in the middle of the night, but never with a guy that always had wrinkled or stained shirts. Never with guys that thought Lucky Charms counted as a balanced breakfast. 

“I think I’d rather stick with the simulation,” she said.

“Your loss.” Jake took a long, noisy slurp of orange soda. “In that case, you have to give me the long, tragic backstory of coming to this place. Did you come all the time with your dad, until you discovered him with a hot mistress?”

“No—”

“Was she his secretary? God, that must have ruined your relationship with him forever.”

Amy gave a snort of laughter.

“Don’t worry, I’ll walk you down the aisle. Unless I’m the guy waiting at the other end. Dang, son, that was smooth.”

Amy tossed her crumpled straw wrapper at him. “No, dufus, I never came here with my dad. This was where Teddy and I came every week while we were together. It was our date spot.”

His face wiped of delight for a second, then filled with confusion. “Every week? This was where you always came?”

“I mean, we went to museums or movies first, but we usually ended up here—”

“That’s insane,” he said. “Like, really wild. Didn’t it get boring to do the same thing all the time?”

This felt dangerously close to his accusation that she only dated people similar to herself, but Amy didn’t mind so much now. Maybe it was the prolonged exposure to Jake, or maybe it was that he didn’t look ready to laugh at her. On the edge of smiling, but with warmth in his eyes instead of mischief.

“Kind of,” she admitted. “He had fun, so I didn’t mind.”

He hummed, leaning back in the booth like an old man. “Well, based on my extensive relationship experience—”

“Sophia is the only long-term girlfriend you’ve had.”

“—I don’t think it was good to do things that only made Teddy happy. It’s not compromise if the other person wins all the time.”

Amy stared at him, stunned. That was actually decent advice, and they both knew it. “Is that what you and Sophia did?”

“No. We were so busy trying to be happy that we ignored important, ugly things.” Jake threw the straw wrapped back at her, grinning when she flinched. “Gotcha. Constant vigilance, Ames.”

“Sure thing, Moody,” she said. One of these days, Amy thought she would get whiplash from Jake’s quick conversation shifts. Or, perhaps worse, Jake would follow through with a conversation, and Amy wouldn’t have anything to distract her from the fact that Jake was a really nice person to be around.

 

 

_Rosa: don't text Jake while he drives. we almost got into an accident because he wanted to respond._

_Amy: Just tell him not to respond while he drives._

_Rosa: pretty sure that he would rather die than miss what you said_

 

 

“I got it right,” Jake grinned. “Pony up.”

Amy groaned. She should have waited to play study games until they reached a unit Jake was really bad at. He was almost decent at reading sine, cosine, and tangent graphs, so she was telling more secrets than he was.

Luckily, Amy was good at coming up with facts that were both unknown and not incriminating. As it turned out, she and Jake didn’t know enough about each other to make the game difficult.

“I can speak Elvish, like in Lord of the Rings,” she said smugly.

“What? Since when?” Jake frowned. “Is that a class? I should have taken that instead of Spanish.”

“I taught myself,” she said. “When we were kids.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “Because it seemed like fun, and I didn’t have anything better to do.” Yikes—that sounded a little sad. She never felt quite right complaining about her happy childhood when Jake’s had been so rough. “Alright, what’s the period of this graph?”

Amy: I iron all of my clothes.

Jake: I taught myself Morse Code so Charles and I could talk during silent reading.

Amy: I skipped school once. Tori Morrison was doing a book signing, but my parents said I couldn’t go.

Amy: My favorite movie is The Breakfast Club.

Amy: God, Jake, stop getting these right. I’ve created a monster. Okay, I had nightmares about Pennywise the clown for months when I was eight.

Jake: Sophia dumped me after prom because I told her I loved her.

Amy froze, jaw dropping. “You’re kidding.”

He shook his head. “Totes serious. I thought it would be all romantic, but it turns out it’s only cute when it’s reciprocated.”

“God, Jake—”

“Don’t.” He was ripping his napkin into tiny pieces, letting them scatter all over the table. He sprinkled a few in his untouched glass of complimentary water, but it didn’t improve his mood. “It’s probably for the best. I was willing to put the work in once she left for college. She wasn’t.”

Amy’s stomach was in knots. Sophia and Jake had seemed really happy. Like, PDA in the halls and cutesy social media photos happy. She’d known that Sophia dumped Jake; he hadn’t teased her for weeks afterwards. The fact was, she just assumed it was college stuff. It was long distance stuff. 

“No,” Amy said firmly. “No, don’t say it like that. That’s a terrible thing for her to do. You deserve better.”

There was a weird second—a second that, if Amy was being honest, was getting pretty common these days—where Jake smiled at her like she’d said something absolutely phenomenal. It wasn’t huge, like when she was funny. It wasn’t smug, like when she said something anal. It was small and sincere, like she’d performed a miracle. Then he smirked, and she wondered if she’d imagined it all.

“Like, I don’t know, a super juicy secret of yours,” he crooned, sliding a completed practice problem at her. 

She grimaced at the obviously correct answer. After his confession, she needed something good. She wasn’t sure that there was anything as significant as his, but she needed something true and personal and—oh.

“I’m scared of driving.”

His eyebrows shot up. “I thought you got your license.”

“I did.” Amy took a long drink, but it didn’t lessen the stiff set of her shoulders. “It’s just—there are a lot of rules that nobody follows. That’s crazy, Jake. Absolutely insane. I’m supposed to be driving a two-ton metal box around, with other people doing the same thing, when nobody pays attention to the rules! It’s a death trap, and—”

Jake was laughing. “Oh my God. So when I told you that you might as well ask for my car—”

“Worst nightmare,” she said. “I avoid all driving, at all costs.”

“And when you said you wanted to me to chauffer—”

“I really need rides,” she said.

“I’ll give you rides,” he grinned. “Even when you lose.”

She ignored that smile, that sincerity. “That’s nice, but you won’t be winning.”

“Tell that to this perfectly done tangent graph.”

She did not tell it to the graph. Instead, with a bitter taste in her mouth, she had to confess something else. Once Jake’s eyes were on another graph, she muttered, “I broke up with Teddy because he was so weird about you. He didn’t like the way you talked to me, and we fought when I didn’t want to make you stop. I kind of had to choose between you, in the end.”

Jake’s pencil broke against the paper when he gaped at her. Then he gaped down at the paper, like he’d never seen a math problem before. Then, to an uncomfortable Amy, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s for the best,” she said, echoing his earlier words.

“Ugh, I think I almost had an emotion just now. I’m officially aborting that mission.” Jake crumpled up the ruined paper and tossed it over his shoulder, evidently accepting defeat. “I accidentally set my crotch on fire in woodshop last year,” he said.

Amy laughed until she snorted, and Jake gave her that goofy little smile again.

 

 

Jake texted Amy a picture of a Ron Stoppable suit, and she laughed.

“If you two don’t bone soon, I might have to skip prom,” Rosa said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Amy said haughtily. Rosa may have said something else, but Amy was too busy editing Jake’s head onto the suit to hear it.

 

 

Two Weeks Until Prom

 

 

“You must be pretty confident in Jake if you’re buying a dress before we know who wins,” Rosa said.

Amy shrugged, systematically going through a rack of blue dresses. Rosa had grabbed the first black dress off the rack, and Gina had her arms full of dresses that would make her look like somebody on Disney Channel. Really, neither of them were the ideal shopping partners for Amy, but she was happy to go with them nonetheless. “I mean, I guess. I just don’t want to get stuck with the ugly dresses because I put off shopping for too long.”

“You gonna go with him even if he loses?”

Amy’s rhythm faltered. “What? Why would I—what makes you think—who ever said—”

“Careful, Rosa,” Gina said. “You fried the computer. You have to say it in a language it understands.” Gina leaned in close and smiled. “All evidence supports the hypothesis that you are madly in love with Jake, and that he would bone you if you asked him to.”

Maybe Amy really was a computer. She wasn’t programmed to think like this.

“Jake likes you,” Gina said, slow and with clear enunciation.

“Liked. Jake liked me.” Amy frowned at Gina. “He can’t like me now.”

Rosa raised one eyebrow. “Why not?”

“Because he knows me now,” Amy said, and it sounded so pathetic out in the open that even Rosa looked a little pitying. “I mean, we’re good friends. He wouldn’t be my friend like that if he Liked me.”

“Girl, no, he likes you.” Gina ran her hands over a puffy, feathery dress. “If you break his heart, I'll break the spine of your copy of To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Amy blanched, but crossed her arms over her chest in what she hoped was more of a defiant pose than a childish one. “Neither of us have to worry about that. I could only break Jake’s heart if I had some kind of hold on it.”

Gina’s eyes were on her phone, as though the conversation had passed from objectionable into unnecessary. “Like you have since middle school? Yeah. It wasn’t a big deal until you started making heart eyes back at him, though.”

“I am not in love with Jake,” Amy spluttered. “Jake is—he’s so—”

Jake was infuriating. Jake was immature, and he was utterly incapable of knowing lines before he crossed them. Sure, he had gotten good at apologies, and he had learned to make Amy laugh. That did not mean he loved her.

He kept her secrets, and he gave some to her in return. She would be lying if she said that she didn’t look forward to sitting with him in homeroom, and there was something relaxing about studying with him now. The fact that she could breathe easily around Jake was not indicative of being in love.

(She decided to ignore the difference between someone not inducing anxiety and somebody making her less anxious. If she thought about that, she would be forced to acknowledge the fact that Jake made her less anxious.)

“Jake and I would be a mess,” she said, not knowing how to explain it in a way that was not damning.

(The fact that it sounded damning did not mean that it actually was. God, her inner scientist reared its head at that statement.)

“You and Jake are already a mess,” Rosa said. “Besides, I thought you liked cleaning.”

Amy, at a loss for words, hurriedly grabbed a dress to try on. Gina snatched it, put it back on the rack, and handed Amy an armful of dresses that Amy would never wear.

Gina picked Amy’s dress. Gina picked Amy’s shoes. Gina picked Amy’s makeup, and handbag, and bought a tie for Jake to match the outfit.

Rosa looked almost happy when she saw the misery on Amy’s face.

 

 

Eleven Days Until Prom

 

 

They should have been studying. They should have been having a last minute cram session so Jake could go into his test the next day with everything fresh. Amy knew what they should have been doing, but she couldn’t find the motivation to stop sitting on the library floor between stacks.

She and Jake were side by side, backs against the bookshelves. It was uncomfortable physically, but Amy felt more calm than she could remember being all year. Her eyes were closed, head tipped back against the spines.

“I really don’t want to fail,” Jake said, breaking the long silence.

“No dip,” she said.

“No, Amy, I really don’t want to fail. It’s not just prom, or Coney Island, or my grades. We’ve worked really hard on this.”

Yeah, they had worked really hard on it. Jake spent his entire life putting in the exact amount of effort he needed to get by, and that excused any low grades. This was the first time he’d really tried, and there was no excuse for failing. If he sucked this time, it was because he sucked in general. That was somehow worse than failing because he hadn’t cared.

Amy didn’t open her eyes when she floundered for his hand so she could squeeze it. “I get it. You aren’t going to fail. You’ll walk into class tomorrow, and everything on the test will be familiar. We put programs in your calculator. We went over formulas. I taught you anagrams. You’re ready, and you’ll kill this.”

His hand was warm, and it was gentle when he squeezed back. “I hope so.”

“No.” She looked at him, and he was already looking at her. His face was young and soft, and it made her breath catch. “No, there’s nothing hopeful about this. I’m stating facts. You’ll kill it.”

He smiled, and it was her chest that caught this time. There was a terrible ache, and her first thought was that she never felt like this when she looked at Teddy. That thought alone was awfully confusing.

“Okay,” Jake finally said. “You’re the boss.”


	3. Chapter Three

One Week Until Prom

 

 

“Amy Santiago!”

She’d had her name bellowed down the hallway before, but she could safely say that she’d never had a choir sing her name down the hall. She turned, her body knowing what was happening before her head did.

At the other end of the hall, the concert choir was standing behind Jake Peralta. He was beaming, both hands holding a packet in the air. He strode toward her, and she gradually realized that his math test had a “B-” written in red.

Amy did not need her chart of grade possibilities to know that Jake had a C-plus in Precalculus now.

“Good Lord,” she said, awed and horrified.

“The Lord most certainly is good,” Jake crowed. “Welcome to Jake Peralta, Prom Date Experience.”

Amy was not upset. She hoped that Rosa, Gina, and Charles were not there to see how not-upset she was.

“I’m not your prom date yet,” she said numbly. “You haven’t officially asked me.” If she ran to the bathroom, maybe she could buy herself some time to figure out a loophole, or at least a way to look absolutely horrified—

“Just you wait, babe,” he said, and pointed at something behind her.

Charles was leaping from one foot to the other, holding his side of the sign with pride. ‘PROM?’ was written in large, lopsided blue letters. The ‘PR’ was huge, like the painter had believed they had far more room than they really did, while the ‘OM’ was small and smushed at the opposite end on the sign. The question mark was above the ‘M,’ with a little arrow pointing to where it should have been. Gina held the other side, but she was paying more attention to her phone than to the promposal.

When she looked back at Jake, he was kneeling. He held out a small plastic ring.

“Jake, don’t—”

“Amy Santiago,” he said. He was beaming. “Will you go to prom with me? You have to say yes.”

“Fine,” she sighed. She couldn’t look upset, but she managed to hide the smile.

Jake threw an arm around her shoulder, blowing kisses to the people who had stopped to watch his spectacle. “The stuff for the sign was more expensive than the ring,” he whispered.

“Your future fiance is in for a treat.”

“One step at a time, Ames,” he said. “Let’s get through prom before we talk about marriage.”

Amy looked behind her, where their friends grinned. Even Rosa looked unbearably pleased about it all. Charles mimed pointing at a ring on his finger, and winked. ‘I hear wedding bells,’ he mouthed.

Amy scowled. It deepened when she realized that Jake smelled really nice.

 

 

_Amy: Congrats on the B-. Seriously._

_Jake: its all thanks to you, boo_

_Amy: We should celebrate._

 

 

“I thought that prom was the celebration,” Jake said, pulling into the parking lot. “You don’t have to buy my food.”

“Prom is not celebration,” she snorted. “Prom is my loss. Prom is what you earned. This is my congratulations. I’ve gotta say, I never expected to hear you complaining about free food.”

Jake grinned then, rubbing his thumb over the jagged edge of his keys. “I’m not complaining. I’m trying to be a gentleman.”

“Ridiculous.”

“There’s a first time for everything.”

She supposed that there was a time when many things seemed impossible. People probably flipped out during the first moon landing. Scientists from a hundred years ago would lose their minds over cell phones. These were things that, while remarkable, were unsurprising to Amy.

She was surprised when Jake held the door open for her. She was surprised when he ran his order by her to make sure it wasn’t too much. She was surprised when she laughed at his jokes instead of rolling her eyes, and she was surprised when Jake seemed happy about it instead of smug.

She was very surprised, and she was very happy.

 

 

Five Days Until Prom

 

 

“Congratulations,” Holt said. He looked softer than usual, and Amy wondered if that was his version of happy. “You worked hard, and it paid off.”  
Jaked beamed. “Turns out I’m better at braining than we thought.”

“Obviously,” Holt deadpanned. He looked at Amy, then back at Jake. “The two of you are a good team. I heard that you’re going to prom together.”

Amy wished she could read him; was that a happy face? Maybe. That would be sort of nice. If Holt was a romantic, that would change everything she’d ever thought about him. Or maybe it was a judgmental look. He wanted an explanation, and Amy didn’t have a good one. Or, she thought she did, but then there was Charles and Gina and Rosa and Jake’s face and Amy’s stupid chest and wow, she really didn’t know anything about anything.

“Yep,” Jake said. His smile was bigger than before, if that was possible. “We’ll be getting our freak on at prom. I mean—in a dancey way. God, that doesn’t sound dancey. Pretend I didn’t say that last part.”

“That was the deal,” Amy said. Holt looked at her. Jake’s smile froze when she continued. “Jake gets his grades up, and I’ll go to the dance with him. Jake won.”

“Ah.” She still couldn’t read Holt’s face, but Jake’s was significantly less cheerful.

She couldn’t be sure that Holt was judging her, but she was definitely judging herself.

“I kind of sounded like a jerk,” she whispered to Jake a minute later. “Did I sound like a jerk just now?”

“No,” he said. He was drawing little faces on his fingertips in pen. His middle finger was frowning. “No, that’s exactly what happened, so it wasn’t jerky.”

She grinned at him. “Cool. It’s going to be so much fun.”

Jake opened his mouth, looked at Amy, and closed it again. He gave a tight-lipped smile. “The funnest.”

His smile was a little bigger when she made a face at his word choice, but not much.

 

 

Amy was, against all odds, excited about prom. She liked the idea of dancing with somebody who wouldn’t expect her to be good. She liked thinking about the subpar food, cheesy music, and teenagers anxiously wondering if they’d be having sex or getting drunk after the dance ended.

In short, everything that would normally psych her out sounded okay. It was because of the people. Charles would hate the food, and he would give her an extensive breakdown of everything the cooks did wrong. If Rosa danced, she would pretend it never happened. Gina would definitely dance, and she would probably do something that ended up on the news. Jake—Jake would be himself, and she could be herself with him, and that didn’t seem like a bad thing.

She was kind of excited, and she had no idea what to do with that. So, of course, she was weird about it.

“Jake, what are you wearing to the dance?” She hugged a binder (AP Lit; the prom binder was at home) to her chest. She had five minutes before her mom picked her up, and she had it timed perfectly so she could solidify their plans. “It really does matter; my mom will freak if you wear something stupid in the pictures. If you’re really going Ron Stoppable, maybe we should meet somewhere far, far away from my house.”

Jake looked a little bit sick. “Amy, about prom—” 

“Want me to look over your binder? I can figure out the cheapest options, or circle the most opposable ones, or anything you want. I can make a plan from scratch, even, if that makes things easier—”

“Ames. Listen to me.”

“You’re right,” she said, grinning. “I need to calm down. I can do that. I can be chill. It’s all good.”

“Stop.”

She did, smile dropping. Jake was usually really good at dealing with her rambling. He always had been. This Jake did not look tolerant. He did not look excited. Amy’s excitement faltered.

“Look, Amy,” Jake said, feet scuffing against the raggedy carpet. “I can’t go to prom with you.”

Amy did not feel like her heart was breaking. She did not feel like it was rising into her throat, or sinking toward her stomach. She did not feel her heart at all—if she didn’t know better, she would have sworn that it disappeared entirely. “What?”

“I can’t go to prom with you,” he repeated. “Sorry for the late notice.”

“Oh,” she said distantly. 

_Reasons Why Jake Could Not Go To Prom With Amy:_

_His mother was horribly sick, and would not get better in the next few days._

_He had forgotten to get a tuxedo, and now he wasn’t sure he could get a good suit in time._

_He was ‘hella broke,’ and did not want to ask her to buy him a ticket. (She, surprisingly, thought that she would be willing to.)_

_Despite months of ragging on her about going together, Jake had realized that Amy was not worth going with. Even as friends._

There it was. A small part of her, so long dormant, reared to life again so it could chant that things like this did not happen to the Amy Santiagos of the world. Jake Peraltas would only ask Amys out as jokes, and even jokes were not worth following through on.

“Right,” she said. “I should have—yeah, that makes sense.”

He blinked, slow and confused. “What do you mean?”

“It was a joke,” she said, plastering on a smile. “It was always a joke, and going for real kind of ruins that. I get it.”

Truthfully, Amy did not get it. She did not want to get it, and she knew that understanding it for real would only make it feel like her ribs were splitting down the middle.

His eyes went wide, and a bewildered huff of unamused laughter broke the tension. “That is the stupidest thing you’ve ever said.”

She tried to come up with a comeback, but she was hollow.

“Seriously, Amy, that isn’t it. It’s the opposite.” This was the most serious she had ever seen him—more than when his dad left, when the threat of failure pushed in, when Charles went through his first big heartbreak. Jake’s eyes were wide and solemn, and his lips were set in a thin, sharp line. “The complete opposite.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t go to prom with you as a joke. I can’t go with you because I won a bet, and then have everything go back to normal on Monday. I want it to be real,” he said. Then, with an almost bitter twist of the lips, “for realz.”

For the first time, Amy understood what it meant to be truly speechless. It wasn’t confusion, or doubt, or uncertainty. Amy was not sure that she had any control over her body, or that she could have opened her mouth if she tried. All she could do was look at Jake, and hope that he couldn’t see the black hole in her chest.

“I’m sorry to ditch so last minute,” he continued. “I know that it’s rude, and all that. But I. Can’t. Do. This.”

By the time Amy realized that she did, in fact, have vocal cords, Jake was gone. Maybe that was for the best, since she had no idea what she would have said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know, this is a short one. I know, a rough place to end. Sorry, my dudes.


	4. Chapter Four

_What Amy Could Have Said to Jake:_

_If you wanted to go for real, you should have asked._

_(Option one: I would have said no, but then I wouldn’t have needed to buy a dress and a ticket.)_

_(Option two: I would have said yes, and we wouldn’t have needed to have this conversation.)_

_You did a terrible job letting me know that you liked me. (Or maybe not.)_

_Were you going to kiss me on the Wonder Wheel?_

_I’m sorry._

 

 

As much as Amy wished that Jake had never cancelled their friend-date, it would have been nice if he had at least done it at a time that she had homework as a distraction. The evening had nothing important enough to banish Jake’s hopeless face from her mind.

She tried watching a documentary about Oliver Sacks, but she kept remembering how broken Jake sounded when he said that he couldn’t do it.

She tried working on her college preparation binder, but she would space out and hear his laugh when she called the date a joke.

In a moment of true desperation, Amy tried doing chores, but that was brainless enough to make the entire conversation cycle through her head like a horror movie. A horror movie in which Amy felt like the bad guy, but probably came out of the trauma less broken than Jake.

 

 

_Gina: whatever you did to Jake, fix it. you broke his little man-boy heart_

_Amy: How did you get my number?_

_Amy: Who is this?_

 

 

Two Days Until Prom

 

 

Amy was starting to consider becoming a spy of some sort, because she was seriously killing it at avoiding her friends.

When she thought of it that way, it did not sound like something to be proud of.

The fact was, she couldn’t face them. Jake most of all, but it was everybody. It was Gina’s knowing looks and ‘I told you not to break him.’ It was Charles’ certainty that Amy was good for Jake, and having to acknowledge that maybe Amy was only capable of doing good things for herself. Maybe she could only ruin other people, the same way ambition always did.

She shared no classes with Gina, so that was a cinch.

She started taking back halls through the school to avoid Charles; the extra time it took to get to her classes made her anxious at first, but it was better than the anxiety she felt when she imagined looking into his trusting face.

Eating lunch in bathroom stalls was humiliating and probably would end with getting Hepatitis A, but it was better than eating at a table alone.

Her undoing, as she probably should have expected, was Rosa.

Amy took a shortcut through the woodshop to avoid seeing Jake on his way to World History, and Rosa was leaning against one of the miter saws.

“Santiago.”

“Rosa,” Amy squeaked. 

_Amy’s Options for Dealing With Rosa:_

_Run away._

_Pretend not to know English until Rosa gives up and leaves._

_Let Rosa beat her up, and hope she never comes back._

_Trust her._

Every single option seemed terrible, but Amy knew for a fact that she could not outrun Rosa. Usain Bolt would be toast if Rosa wanted something of him. The other two were cowardly, and Amy had enough things to dislike about the world without adding herself to the mix. She cleared her throat and smiled, aiming for casual. “What’s up?”

“I could ask you the same thing. I’m not the one hiding.” Rosa’s face was stone, and Amy wilted.

“Yeah. Yeah, I know.”

Rosa took a few steps closer and put her hands on her hips. “Jake told me what happened.”

Amy bit her lip.

“He’s an idiot.”

“What?”

“Jake is acting stupid,” Rosa said. “He’s forgetting that some girls aren’t like me or Gina. Some girls are like Charles.”

“I can’t tell if that’s a dig,” Amy said.

“It’s not,” Rosa replied, though the words were begrudging. “Jake was hurting, and he didn’t think that talking it out would make it hurt less.”

“Do you think it would have?” Amy leaned gingerly against a work table, hoping that she wouldn’t get sawdust all over her butt.

“That’s on you.” Rosa started walking towards the door.

“Wait! What was the point of this?”

Rosa didn’t stop. “Jake is the stupid one. Do something smart.”

 

 

_Amy: Do you want to meet to study tonight?_

_Jake: nah, I should be fine. I probs cant wreck my grade so bad that I cant go to coney_

_Amy: Cool cool cool cool cool_

 

 

One Day Until Prom

 

 

Rosa managed to get the drop on Amy, and that had been a terrifying ordeal. Terrifying, but enlightening. She had probably been right, all things considered, so Amy would have to put some thought into how much she must have been underestimating Rosa in the past.

Another time.

The more troubling issue at hand was that Jake was not interested in talking to Amy. It was something of a shock, since she was usually the one trying to get out of talking to him. She wanted to make a list, but the list contents depended on the one thing she didn’t know: what she wanted to say to him. If she wasn’t interested in going out with him for real, letting him move on was best. She shouldn’t talk to him.

If, however, she did want to go out with him, letting him move on would wreck her.

Amy was an expert in matters of the mind, and she was proud of it. She always had been. That being said, she knew her limitations, and matters of the heart were not her forte. She needed a professional, so she lured him in with the promise of ice cream sundaes and talking about Jake.

“Salted caramel,” Charles said happily. “Great choice, Amy.”

“Thanks. Sorry to skip the niceties, but I actually need your help.”

He straightened. “Is this about Jake?”

“Isn’t everything?”

Charles smiled. “Everything should be. Okay—business.”

Charles knew Jake. Charles knew Jake’s guilty pleasure music, and his favorite stores to go to when he wanted to feel classy, and all fifteen books that Jake had read over the years. So, when Charles told Amy that Jake had never really gotten over her, she believed him.

“Where does Sophia come into all of this?” Amy carefully twisted her spoon to wrap caramel around the ice cream before taking a bite. “He didn’t—he wasn’t faking anything with her. He really liked her.”

“Absolutely. She just filled a different role for him. Sophia was all Jake, through and through. If he fell short in an area, she had the same vice. There was plenty of fun, plenty of happy, and plenty of problems.” He pointed his spoon at Amy. “You and Jake aren’t that alike at all, and that’s why it works. You have plenty of the same good qualities, but you make up for each other's’ faults. The balance is good.”

Amy raised her eyebrows at him. “Seems like you’ve thought about this a lot.”

“I had to. I needed to have all thirteen of my slowburn friendfics make sense.” At her questioning look, he elaborated. “Friend fanfiction.”

“Oh my God, Charles.”

“I also write it about all of us as friends, if that makes you feel better.”

“It really doesn’t,” she said. “It really, really doesn’t. Before I go and try to forget what you just said, I have one more question.”

“Shoot.”

Amy looked at her bowl, halfheartedly scraping at the sticky remains of her sundae. “Why didn’t Jake say something before now?”

“Oh,” Charles said. He gave a snort of laughter. “That’s an easy one. Until now, Jake had an easy time pretending that he was okay with only having some of you.”

“But now?”

“He knows what it’s like to have a lot of you, and he’s tired of pretending.”

 

 

_Amy: Let’s say, hypothetically, that I liked Jake Peralta._

_Terry: not gonna lie, Amy, im pretty sure were past hypotheticals. i think youve been there for a long time_

_Amy: Believe it or not, that helps._

 

 

Five Hours Until Prom

 

 

Amy had always been able to imagine life after high school. She could picture college at NYU; spending hours in the library, decorating her dorm room to find that balance between comfort and efficiency, drinking too much coffee while she worked ahead in her classes. 

She could picture getting a small apartment after she graduated, and loving it despite the inevitable crappiness. There would be plants, and books, and everything would match.

She wanted that life. She wanted it in a way that made her chest ache and her eyes light up, and she had never been afraid to do anything that got her toward that goal. Anxious, perhaps, but never afraid.

On Saturday afternoon, Amy looked at her prom dress, and she was afraid.

She wanted NYU, and she wanted the order she’d always imagined. Now, however, she imagined having a beanbag chair in the corner of her dorm. She imagined drinking coffee with a boy instead of on her own. 

She wanted that apartment, but she was able to picture it with less order. Furniture that may not match, but that she could sink into. Books, but comics and video games on the same bookcase.

Different shelves, of course—she wasn’t a monster.

Amy imagined her future, and there was room for Jake in it. She couldn’t guarantee that he would want her for that long; eighteen was awfully young for those decisions. If he wanted her, she would have him.

To make that happen, she would have to go get him.

 

 

_Wooing Jake Checklist:_

_Corsage (Something neutral, since Jake never said what his suit was like.)_

_Boombox (A phone will have to do.)_

_A sick ride (Do minivans count?)_

 

 

“You can do this,” she muttered. “Amy Santiago, you have got this in the bag.”

She backed out of the driveway. She went over the curb, but only a little.

“B-plus. You’re better than that.”

She had driven two blocks, and she thought that her arms were locking.

“No. Nonononono. Jake Peralta is out there somewhere, and he thinks that you don’t like him.”

Amy could grit her teeth and bare this. Really, if Jake understood what she was doing, he’d probably be willing to drive them to the actual dance. She just had to get to his house, get him into a suit, and let him know that this was about as romantic as she was ever going to get.

“Eyes closed, head first, can’t lose.” Amy gave a huff of laughter. “Except, not literally, since that would make every one of your worst nightmares come true.”

She stopped at red lights. She put on her turn signal way before making a turn. She was, in short, the Michael Jordan of driving. Amy Santiago drove to Jake’s house, and nothing bad happened. Maybe she believed in miracles, after all.

Mrs. Peralta answered the door, and the grin on her face made Amy think that she made the right choice.

“I was hoping you’d show up,” she said.

Amy smiled back. “Was he?”

“We’ll find out. I’ll go get him.”

_How Jake Will React:_

_He’ll say that saying he liked you was a lie he used to get out of going to prom with you._

_He’ll kiss you, like in one of your mom’s romance novels._

_He’ll tell you that it’s too late._

_He’ll have gotten a Ron Stoppable suit after all._

_He’ll tell you—_

Amy did not have time to finish number five, since Jake came to the door and her mind blanked.

He was wearing a Ninja Turtles t-shirt and sweatpants, so she thought that he must not have been expecting her. He took in her dress, her hair, the corsage in her hand.

He looked at the empty car behind her.

He looked at her phone, eyebrows shooting up when she pressed play on ‘In Your Eyes.’

“Hey there, sweet thang,” she said. His lips curled then, and Amy allowed herself to hope.

“Fancy seeing you here,” he said.

“I’m not about to let you stand me up on our first date,” she said. “You’ve been pestering me for weeks about hanging out without doing math; I’m not letting you bail now.”

His face was carefully blank. “That’s reasonable.”

“I’d say that I would walk five hundred miles, but I honestly think driving ten miles was a bigger deal here. I will drive for you, Jake Peralta.” Amy held out her corsage. She could hear her heartbeat. She could hear his breath hitch when she took a step closer to tie it to his wrist. “Let’s do this for real. For realz.”

Jake’s face split into a grin, and he looked at her like she was a miracle. “I have to go change,” he said, and Amy was ready for the future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Merry Christmas, guys! I hope this is what you were hoping for. The epilogue will be posted on Friday!


	5. Epilogue

Amy had never quite learned to balance anxiety and excitement, so she was generally all of one or the other. Things were scary, or things were perfect. Things made her sick inside, or things got her too jazzed to focus on anything else.

Jake did not have that problem. Jake could be happy and sad, angry and enthused, nervous and thrilled. Jake could look at the Wonder Wheel with excitement while holding Amy’s hand so tight that it went numb.

“We don’t have to go,” she said. “We could go on the Tilt-a-Whirl again.”

“We’ve been waiting for a half hour. We gotta.” He had a million reasons to go on the ride—it was a tradition, it was dark enough for them to see lights all over the park, Amy refused to let him go on anything too fast right after eating two corndogs, and so on. The one excuse he didn’t have was an actual desire to ride the Wonder Wheel.

She rolled her eyes. “It really doesn’t matter. It’s just a ride.”

“The most romantic ride in the park,” he said, looking at her like she was stupid. 

She linked her arm with his, giving him a squeeze. The longer they stood in line, the stiffer he became. She wondered if, on some small level, Jake was scared of heights. Most of the rides didn’t involve staying in place for long, but a ferris wheel was made of long periods of dizzying heights. If that freaked him out, she couldn’t blame him. “If you’re looking for romance, we can just make out behind a food truck.”

“C’mon, Ames, this is it. This is the Big Moment. It’s all been leading up to this. You saw me in my prom suit, and decided to mack on my face on the Wonder Wheel.”

“Yeah, it wasn’t the suit—” 

He grinned at her, like the weeks of dating hadn’t diluted that mixture of confusion and delight that Amy Santiago could want him.

(She would have teased him about it, but her chest had to expand to make room for her growing heart every time he held her hand and ran his thumb over the line on her knuckles.)

“Amy, I adore you, but don’t try to tell me that you chose me for my personality. We all know it was the promise of a bomb-ass blue suit.”

Somewhere in the park, Charles was trying to win a stuffed animal for an apathetic Rosa. Gina was elsewhere, probably under a roller coaster so she could film somebody dropping their phone during a loop-the-loop. Terry, after a month at his girlfriend’s house, was driving home.

Because none of their friends were around to see it, Amy leaned her forehead against Jake’s shoulder and smiled. He rested his head against hers, and she felt him smile when she said, “You’re right. That suit is the hottest thing about you. I don’t know how you’ll top it to keep me interested.”

“I wear it under my clothes. If you ever get bored, I’ll just take off the outer layer.”

She’d hoped that Jake would wind down a little once they were seated on the ride, but he white-knuckled the bar. Amy tried to relax while the seat rocked back and forth. Deep breaths. If she looked nervous, Jake would probably have a heart attack.

“Let’s go over the plan for college,” she said, scooching so her arm pressed against his.

“Again?” His voice was a little strangled. “Santiago, I swear, I know it. I have it memorized.”

“Tell me.”

“Freshman year,” he said, putting on an announcer voice. “At least one date night per week, not including any study sessions that you need me for.”

Amy laughed. “Right. I’ll really need your help.”

He continued, leaning a little more into her arm. His voice had steadied some. “You’ll be at NYU, so we won’t have a long commute. Sophomore year, we’ll get an apartment together.”

Amy could picture it all. Maybe she was jumping in too fast—maybe she should wait until later in the relationship to be plan to move in together, or to plan her class schedule around a boy she’d only wanted to be with for a little over a month. 

Still, when the ride began and Jake’s hand shot out to take hers, she had trouble thinking it was a bad idea. She’d known him for a million years, after all; they got to skip the awkward beginnings and right to the good parts.

A ways off, Raymond Holt was looking at the ride. Teenagers could be foolish; Santiago and Peralta were evidence enough of that. There was a part of him that thought they were foolish in not getting together earlier than they did, and another part that thought they were foolish for getting together at all. He wasn’t sure that he had ever seen a more childish relationship. That being said, he wasn’t sure that he had ever been more confident in the longevity of a high school relationship. 

Holt almost smiled, turning away from the ferris wheel. Nobody around him would have been able to see the fondness on his face, but it was there nonetheless.

“I’m not scared of heights,” Jake said, stiff enough that his limbs quaked. He squeaked when Amy moved closer, making the seat sway again.

“I’m sure,” she said. She wiggled under one of his arms, molding herself into his side. She took deep breaths, smiling when his slowed to match. “But, you know, I won’t tell anyone if you cry. Probably.”

“I wouldn’t cry,” he said, indignant. “I hardly ever cry.”

_Times Amy Saw Jake Cry—An Abridged Version:_

_In second grade, when his mom was late picking him up on a day that his dad had always come_

_The time he broke his front tooth in fourth grade_

_Sixth grade, when she beat him at Field Day_

_Freshman year, when they watched “Where the Red Fern Grows” in homeroom_

_She wasn’t totally sure, but she thought she saw a tear fall once at lunch after Sophia broke up with him. His ex been laughing at her lunch table, like nothing was wrong. Nobody said anything about it_

_Two weeks ago, when they watched Winnie the Pooh together_

She would definitely have argued with him, but he stopped her with a kiss. Amy had not been surprised to find out that Jake was a good kisser, but she was pleasantly surprised to find out that it was the one thing he was patient about. There was no teeth clicking or awkward timing when he kissed her, and he was as studious about what she liked as she was about everything else.

He’d suggested, once, that they’d finally found something he knew more about than she did. Furthermore, he ‘could be a great tutor, if she was into that sort of thing.’ She’d laughed.

(It had been true, but she’d laughed. Jake had enough to make fun of Teddy about without adding subpar kissing to the list.)

“You’re gonna miss the view,” she said, a little short of breath.

“Don’t tell anyone,” he said, “but I might be a little scared of heights.” He had one hand on the back of her neck, and the other running over her back and ribs. It felt good enough that she didn’t feel like laughing.

“I think I can keep that to myself.” Still, she pulled back a little to see the lights. From the ground, the park was dirty and full of annoying people. From the sky, it was beautiful. It felt like the something out of a movie.

Jake made her feel like something out of a movie, sometimes.

She turned to him, opening her mouth to say something sappy or romantic or incomprehensible, when he pointed over to the biggest roller coaster in sight.

“What’re the odds that that ride goes full on Final Destination Three?”

The desire to laugh came back, and the sappy feeling receded some. She wound her fingers through his. “That’s so unoriginal. Now, a ferris wheel rolling off its axis to crush passerbys—I’d watch that.”

“I hate you, and I should never have gotten on this ride.” Even as he said the words, he kissed her temple.

“I hate you too,” she said.

Jake grinned. “Yeah, I was hoping you’d say that.”

He kissed her again, and Amy admitted to herself that there was nobody she’d rather learn from.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! I loved reading everybody's comments.
> 
> Byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee


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